I’m leaving FXHOME: here’s why

After 14 years, I’m leaving FXHOME at the end of this month.

14 is not an insubstantial number of years. One of my colleagues was 10 years old when I started working there. Back then, the Internet (and thus, the world) was very different. No Facebook. No YouTube. Google was still just a search engine. The iPhone hadn’t been invented. George W Bush and Tony Blair were getting ready to carve up the world. Nobody had seen the battle for Helms Deep. Half Life 2 was still two years away, as was Steam.

Anyway.
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Heads Up: Riffing on Iron Man

Something I don’t think I’ve blogged about is my recent work at FXHOME on a Marvel-inspired campaign called Heads Up, designed to launch the new HitFilm 4 Express product. I ended up writing and editing a ton of videos, which have already nabbed over 204,000 views. A truly mind-bending stat.

Here’s the main sketch that everything hangs off:

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Feeling the chill: summoning the trolls

A recent video I produced and presented for the HitFilm channel was all about editing gaming videos. Pretty simple but useful stuff, presented in a nicely relaxed manner. Given the channel has a fairly diverse viewership, I wanted to have a brief overview that established the culture of online gaming videos for anybody unfamiliar with the concept. Here’s the finished video:

When scripting the episode I had a moment of weakness and it’s been irritating me ever since. (more…)

Experiences of SXSW

I went to SXSW! This is exciting because it’s an event which has grown increasingly relevant and influential over the last decade, has spread into every corner of every news website I read, and this year…I was there.

FXHOME kindly flew me there and back, accompanied by my colleagues Kirstie, Josh and Andrea. In summary: Austin is wonderful. SXSW is weird and confused but mostly good. (more…)

Kramer-style star

An occasional hobby is taking Andrew Kramer’s fantastic tutorials for After Effects and transposing them into HitFilm, to see how close I can get ’em. Most of the time it works out pretty damn well. So, his latest tutorial is a beautiful star close-up, and this is my own version, Read more…